Why do cats lick you? Grooming is only one way cats say, I love you." Some cats shower their favorite humans with sandpaper kisses. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. If you've ever been around a cat, you know they can get the sudden urge to groom themselves at just about any moment. Everything seems lovely and content. Then, they lose all interest in you and start licking their butt. A cat will be busy grooming themselves. Other cats can't be bothered and won't ever groom or lick their human friends, or other kitty friends for that matter. So, why do some cats lick their owners? Are they trying to clean you, too? We asked an animal behaviorist and cat expert to help us sort out exactly what is going on when your cat licks you. For a mother cat, grooming is an important part of child rearing. When a mama cat licks her kittens it serves two important purposes: keeping her kittens clean and promoting social bonds, Kristyn Vitale, an animal behaviorist at Maueyes Cat Science and Education tells . On the one hand, "mother cats are going to groom their kittens to help keep them clean and healthy," says Vitale. Kittens can be especially susceptible to diseases, and "anybody who's raised young kittens knows how dirty they can get, and a mother cat is not going to obviously bathe their kitten in a tub.

Coldplay's Chris Martin made a surprise appearance at a couple's wedding to play the music for their first dance. The groom's mother had asked the singer for a video message to be played at the wedding of Abbie and James Hotchkiss from Stafford. He went one better, though, and said he would appear in person, with only the newlyweds and the groom's parents in on the secret. Surprised guests saw him walk into the wedding venue, Blithfield Lakeside Barns in Staffordshire, wearing a white beanie hat to perform All My Love at the piano while the couple danced. Guests took a while to notice it was actually him, but didn't want to ruin our wedding day so asked us loads of questions once he'd gone, Mrs Hotchkiss said.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Orca whales (Orcinus orca) are among the most fearsome apex predators in the ocean. One well-studied group of orcas living between Washington State and British Columbia now has a new skill to add to its repertoire–tool manufacturing and use. The whales create tools from kelp and appear to use them to help groom one another. The findings are detailed in a study published June 23 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.

Ensemble Kalman Filtering (EnKF) is a popular technique for data assimilation, with far ranging applications. However, the vanilla EnKF framework is not well-defined when perturbations are nonlinear. We study two non-linear extensions of the vanilla EnKF - dubbed the conditional-Gaussian EnKF (CG-EnKF) and the normal score EnKF (NS-EnKF) - which sidestep assumptions of linearity by constructing the Kalman gain matrix with the `conditional Gaussian' update formula in place of the traditional one. We then compare these models against a state-of-the-art deep learning based particle filter called the score filter (SF). This model uses an expensive score diffusion model for estimating densities and also requires a strong assumption on the perturbation operator for validity. In our comparison, we find that CG-EnKF and NS-EnKF dramatically outperform SF for a canonical problem in high-dimensional multiscale data assimilation given by the Lorenz-96 system. Our analysis also demonstrates that the CG-EnKF and NS-EnKF can handle highly non-Gaussian additive noise perturbations, with the latter typically outperforming the former.

In November 2020, the usual dark wet of fall settled into Seattle--and with the pandemic raging and outdoor gatherings less appealing, my social life took a nosedive. To fill my evenings, I decided to take on those things I always said I'd do if only I had more time, like practicing my Chinese. While I grew up speaking Mandarin, I'd never mastered reading or writing characters, so I fired up my long-neglected Duolingo account and committed to doing at least a lesson a day. Whether you've already got some language proficiency under your belt or are starting out as a complete beginner, Duolingo doesn't teach languages the way you might have learned them in school, with lists of vocabulary and verb conjugations. Instead, it makes you jump right in and start matching words with their meanings or translating sentences.

Supervised machine learning, in which machine learning models learn from labeled training data, is only as good as the quality of that data. In a study published in the journal Quantitative Science Studies, researchers at consultancy Webster Pacific and the University of California, San Diego and Berkeley investigate to what extent best practices around data labeling are followed in AI research papers, focusing on human-labeled data. They found that the types of labeled data range widely from paper to paper and that a "plurality" of the studies they surveyed gave no information about who performed labeling -- or where the data came from. While labeled data is usually equated with ground truth, datasets can -- and do -- contain errors. The processes used to build them are inherently error-prone, which becomes problematic when these errors reach test sets, the subsets of datasets researchers use to compare progress. A recent MIT paper identified thousands to millions of mislabeled samples in datasets used to train commercial systems.

Chimpanzees get more selective over who they associate themselves with as they age, new research reveals. In a study spanning two decades in a Ugandan national park, US experts observed social interactions among 21 wild male chimps, ranging in age from 15 to 58 years. Both chimps and humans prefer to be around the company of old friends and spend less time among new faces, the experts conclude. Ageing male chimps have more mutual and positive friendships than younger chimps, who have more one-sided, antagonistic relationships. Chimps also showed a shift from negative interactions to more positive ones as they reached their twilight years, 'like humans looking for some peace and quiet'.

Dr. Zoe Danielle Birnbaum and James Matthew Frankel are to be married Feb. 9 by Rabbi Jeffrey Sirkman at Tappan Hill Mansion in Tarrytown, N.Y. The bride and groom graduated from Colgate. Dr. Birnbaum, 30, is a third-year resident in the field of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center, and received a medical degree from N.Y.U. She is a daughter of Dr. Lisa Turtz and Jesse Birnbaum of Larchmont, N.Y. The bride's father is a member of the quality assurance team at the Mahwah, N.J., manufacturing facility of Nobel Biocare, the Swiss-based maker of dental implants and individualized prosthetics.

Puffins use wooden sticks as tools to scratch, groom themselves and possibly dislodge ticks -- suggesting that the seabirds may be smarter than was thought. Tool use is rare behaviour for animals -- an activity largely confined to primates and perching birds when engaging in complex, often feeding-related, tasks. However, zoologists led from the University of Oxford have reported two sightings of puffin tool-use, one from Iceland and the other from Pembrokeshire, Wales. Puffins use wooden sticks as tools to scratch, groom themselves and possibly dislodge ticks -- suggesting that the seabirds may be smarter than was thought. Tool use is rare behaviour for animals.

In a recent post, we explained the emerging field of intelligent nudging. Nudge theory has been popularised through the works of Richard Thaler et al, yet in reality nudge techniques have been a part of human society for hundreds of years. Thanks to AI, nudge techniques are getting smarter and smarter. At the moment, intelligent nudging is in the very early stages of development. But, according to Jez Groom, founder and Chief Choice Architect at Cowry Consulting, AI has catalysed a new breed of nudge.